Karin
Most Poles have never met a Karin: only around 650 carry it, and nearly all of them are women. The name is Germanic at root and means "pure".
Karin Pronunciation
Karin is pronounced KAH-reen (/ˈkarin/).
What Karin means
Where Karin comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Karin comes from the Germanic-speaking north, a short form that German and Scandinavian families shaped out of the longer Katharina. Its story is Nordic and German both. The short meaning, given in Polish as czysta, is "pure," yet that sense of purity was attached to the name later, borrowed from the tradition of Saint Katharina rather than built into the syllables Germanic speakers first used.
Sweden gave the form one of its clearest voices in Karin Boye, the poet and novelist who died in 1941. Her work kept the name legible far beyond the Nordic countries, and it still turns up in reading lists there today.
On a Polish class register, Karin sits among the Katarzynas and Karolinas, close kin by sound yet plainly its own entry. It stays four letters where the fuller name runs on. The Germanic short form stayed short, and its later gloss, czysta, travels quietly alongside it.
How many people are named Karin
1 in 34844 women in Poland is named Karin. 651 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #1163 among female names.
Karin as a middle name
Karin is a first name for 651 women in Poland and a middle name for another 251, a 72/28 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 427th, between Margarita (252) and Luisa (250).
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#425 Martha255
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#426 Margarita252
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#427 Karin251
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#428 Luisa250
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#429 Irmgarda249